"Transgression and the Sacred," an International Philosophy and Literature Conference, University College Dublin, February 22-23, 2011.

Transgression refers to a crossing over, the exceeding of bounds or limits, the infringement or violation of a law or convention. For Bataille, it is through acts of transgression that we experience the sacred. The profane world is the world of the taboo, while the subject of a taboo, that which the taboo prohibits, is sacred. Yet, transgression does not deny or destroy the taboo; it exceeds the taboo but also completes it.

In our post-enlightenment age transgression and the limit have replaced the older dichotomy of the sacred and the profane. If transgression and the sacred depend on limits what are the limits that still exist in the modern world? If we live in a largely limitless world has the sacred now disappeared?

Or, do we now in fact now live in a post-secular world? How has the sacred been reorganised or reconstituted in modern philosophical and literary discourse? How might transgression be important in rediscovering the sacred, as Foucault declares in his ‘Preface to Transgression’, “In that zone which our culture affords for our gestures and speech, transgression prescribes not only the sole manner of discovering the sacred in its unmediated substance, but also a way of recomposing its empty form, its absence”.

Bataille’s ideas on transgression and the sacred derive largely from the anthropology of religion. The word ‘sacred’ derives from the Latin sacer, meaning to set apart. The sacred is separated from the profane by a taboo or limit. Therefore we want to examine the importance of liminality, the scapegoat, sacrifice, pollution, and sacred transgressors such as Hermes and Trickster in the history of philosophy and literature.

We would also like to consider theological conceptions of the sacred. Bataille’s conception of the sacred is anti-Christian and denies any form of transcendence or salvation; Christianity is the least religious of all religions for him as it denies the impure aspect of the sacred – eroticism, excess, excretion, horror, death. But what is the relationship between transgression and the sacred in Christianity and the major religions and how is this relationship represented in philosophy and literature? Rudolph Otto refers to the numinous in which the Other, the wholly other or the transcendent, appears as a mysterium tremendum et fascinans - that is, a mystery before which man both trembles and is fascinated, is both repelled and attracted. How might such a deification and demonising of the Other be problematised in philosophy and literature?

We welcome papers that engage exclusively with philosophy or exclusively with literature and literary theory, or papers that combine the two disciplines - the literary analysis of philosophy or the use of philosophy as a theoretical framework for the analysis of literary texts.

Topics may include (but are not limited to) the following:

The scapegoat
Eroticism
Violence and the sacred
Sin
Gothic and horror fiction
Shamans and tricksters as sacred transgressors
Liminality – border-crossing, the sacred and the spatial conditioning of transgression
The stranger / the Other
Wild men, sacred savages and holy fools
Derrida and messianicity
Lyotard’s The Confessions of Augustine
The Carnivalesque
Hallucinogens, altered states of consciousness and sacred visions
Blasphemy and censorship
Gender studies and Queer theory
The writings of The Marquis de Sade, Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Michel Foucault
Transgressive Literature and genre
Levinas on the sacred and the holy
Transgressing form and textual boundaries, transgressing sacred texts
Postcolonialism
Modernism / postmodernism

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WHAT IS 'THEORY'?

Institutionalised philosophy has before it something called 'philosophy,' which is emphatically not philosophy, that does not follow the protocols of that discipline, that does not measure up to apparently transparent standards of logical rigour and clarity. . . . This institutionalised 'philosophy,' which is not itself, produces another paradox as well: it proliferates a second philosophy outside the boundary that philosophy itself has set, and so it seems that philosophy has unwittingly produced this spectral double of itself. It may be that what is practised as philosophy in most of the language and literature departments . . . has come to constitute the meaning of 'philosophy,' and so the discipline of philosophy must find itself strangely expropriated by a double. And the more it seeks to dissociate itself from this redoubled notion of itself, the more effective it is in securing the dominance of this other philosophy outside the boundary that was meant to contain it. (Judith Butler, "Can the 'Other' of Philosophy Speak?" 241)

I shall use the word ‘theorist’ rather than ‘philosopher’ because the etymology of ‘theory’ gives me the connotation I want, and avoids some I do not want. The people I shall be discussing do not think that there is something called ‘wisdom’ in any sense of the term which Plato would have recognised. So the term ‘lover of wisdom’ seems inappropriate. But theoria suggests taking a view of a large stretch of territory from a considerable distance, and this is just what the people I shall be discussing do. They all specialise in standing back from, and taking a large view of, what Heidegger called the ‘tradition of Western metaphysics’ – what I have been calling the ‘Plato-Kant canon.’ (Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity 96)

Everywhere I go, I find a poet has been there before me. (Sigmund Freud)

A man with one theory is lost. He needs several of them, or lots! He should stuff them in his pockets like newspapers. (Bertolt Brecht)

Something is happening to the way we think about the way we think. (Clifford Gertz, "Blurred Genres: the Refiguration of Social Thought" 20)

The history of thought is the history of its models. (Frederic Jameson, The Prison-House of Language)